Needed images list (wiki) for existing Wikipedia articles

Loopy30 · January 18, 2021, 11:17pm

Many articles on Wikipedia could use an image, but the only corresponding images on iNaturalist lack an appropriate sharing license. If you have a research grade image of one of these taxa, please consider changing the image license to CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA and noting it here. Then, another volunteer can upload the image to Wikimedia Commons and the image can be featured on Wikipedia (any language).

Another wiki list has also been started for those images not yet represented on Wikimedia Commons and do not have a corresponding Wikipedia article on them created, but are desired for possible future articles on the subject.

murphyslab · December 18, 2020, 2:07am

A bit of a question/suggestion for the iNat staff – would it be possible to have an (official?) iNat bot that comments on users’ observations (i.e. if the species matches a list of target species) to suggest making the image available for contribution through a change of license? Posts like this are great, but unless one’s highly familiar with scientific taxonomy, just posting a list like this isn’t going to connect with a lot of people. Even if I recognize “Quercus” in the list, and think, maybe I have an oak in my observations, it’s a circuitous process. It just won’t connect with a lot of users here.

So far I’ve personally contributed two of my observation photos to Wikipedia & Wikispecies. But that happens through a very different process; I’m curious to know more about the uncommon species that I’ve observed and I turn to Wikipedia & Wikispecies frequently. .

Loopy30 · December 18, 2020, 2:45pm

Hi murphyslab, first off - thank you for sharing your observations and uploading images to Wikimedia projects.

Secondly, although a list of scientific names like this might seem a bit arcane, I don’t expect individual users to view it and recognize species that they may have seen. In fact, for most of these entries, there are only a few, and sometimes only one user, who has recorded these observations. Rather, the purpose of the list is more of a place holder for those who may wish to make a request to the original observers that they might change their license. If I have more time in the future, I may also add the common name (if it exists) for each species and ensure that each entry is linked to its iNat observations page.

I am aware that other iNat users (eg. @josve05a, @cazort, @bouteloua) are also conducting this sort of activity and a wiki such as this page will allow us to better coordinate our efforts.

choess · December 18, 2020, 10:48pm

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced this format (hand-maintained wiki here) is sustainable: there are about 57,000 plant articles (only!) on en.wikipedia that have been tagged as needing an image. I think a more selective approach might be needed. While I have some doubt as to the overall utility of the en.wikipedia article rating scale, maybe cutting down the list to existing articles of C-class or above, or B-class or above might make it more manageable, and also provide an incentive to upgrade articles before trawling for photographs.

Loopy30 · December 19, 2020, 1:44am

This list is indeed just a start and probably not the best format. Perhaps a spreadsheet on google docs would be a better way to keep it updated than a hand-curated list. Feel free to start such a beast if you have the time.

As far as article quality ratings go, an article is generally required to already have an image in order to attain a C or higher rating. All the rest will be “stubs” and “start” articles. For the 57k plant articles requiring an image, we can reduce that number considerably by the fact that:

some of these will already have an image but the talk page project box has not been updated yet (leading it to be counted as “needing an image”)
some of these articles will have associated images available (but so far unused) on Wikipedia Commons
most of these articles will not have a corresponding research grade observation within iNaturalist (which has a total of 113k species of all plants)
some of the remaining observations will already have a permissible sharing license and be able to be uploaded immediately.

The point is not to “trawl for more photographs”, but to request the observers to share an image when theirs is the only research grade image available on either Wikimedia commons or iNaturalist combined.

choess · December 19, 2020, 5:44am

Illustrations aren’t mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_assessment until B class (they’re optional, though certainly desirable for a taxon). I think it would be difficult to push it past that, although I think I’ve seen fossil taxa make it to FA without an image.

I fired up https://imagechecker.toolforge.org/ and it looks like there’s around 5500 plant articles incorrectly tagged as needing images; of course, there may also be some that need images and aren’t tagged in the project template. My experience is that there’s not a huge amount of low-hanging fruit on Commons in terms of images that could be used in existing articles.

I’m sorry to be a wet blanket, but I’m not sure these wikis on the forum are going to be a very productive approach. The forum presumably attracts a very small fraction of observers; admittedly, these will generally be “power users”, but many of them have also reached conclusive opinions for or against releasing their own images under Wikipedia-usable terms. For those people who are on the fence, the odds of them scrolling through a very long list of taxa and hitting one where they could contribute an RG image seem low.

My suggestion about “C”-class articles or above wasn’t just an arbitrary way to cut down on the list. There’s clearly some resistance to the idea of bulk release of photos in the hopes that some of them might someday be incorporated into a Wikipedia article. Maybe seeing an existing, well-written article would evoke more of a sense of reciprocity?

Loopy30 · December 19, 2020, 1:53pm

Illustrations are used as a rating criteria needed for C class by the Wikipedia plants project here.

Again, I do not in any way ever expect a random observer to stumble across this list, review it and decide to change a license on one of their images. That is not its purpose. Rather, it can serve as a common point of coordination for those small number of iNat users who already send requests to iNat users that ask them if they would change their image license in order to improve Wikipedia articles.

Usually a request starts with a small ask, could they release a single image for a Wikipedia article that lacks any images? Once you point out the advantages of sharing the image and that theirs is the only observation of that species on iNaturalist, they often change not only the license for that image, but all their other observations as well.

It is still a time consuming and inefficient process. There is no low hanging fruit among this list. Instead, it is far more productive to trawl through the observations of those users who have already set a default license that allows sharing, which together represent at least 90k species. This list is merely a byproduct of those efforts which can then be used when a particular image is desired.